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Angell is 89 now, at some complain that he's got an air of things-were-better-in-my-day about him. Alex Belth cherrypicks a few of the piece's great quotes regarding Alex Rodriguez, Reggie Jackson, and Hideki Matsui, and they all contain a hint of disdain for the present as opposed to the past. Nonetheless, even if he weren't still such a master of prose, Angell's perspective would be a valuable one simply because the breadth of baseball history he witnessed firsthand — back to the days of Ruth and Gehrig, or the Gashouse Gang, or Willie Mays in his prime in the Polo Grounds — grants him an authority on the subject that's virtually unmatched. If he sounds a bit crotchety at times, well, where the hell else are you gonna get a comparison like this:
He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producing it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings back across his waist. This columnar closing posture — he's not twisted off to one side, like other pitchers, but driving forward, with the back leg still aloft, as his eyes follow the pitch — is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood. He looked a little dusty and work-worn out there, which may have contributed to this impression. I thought about Dizzy Dean or Lon (the Arkansas Hummingbird) Warneke, but they were righties. Then I remembered Hal Newhouser, the Tigers' lefty ace in the nineteen-forties, who ate up batters much in the way that Lee does. Later, I put my question in a phone call to Seymour Siwoff, the dean of the Elias Sports Bureau. "Hmmm," he said when i mentioned the flying back leg, "let me think about this for a minute." There was a pause, and then he said, "Why do I think it was somebody on the Tigers?"
A few other favorites... On the American League Championship Series:
Nothing much about the Championship Series with the Los Angeles Angels feels like fun in retrospect, even from this distance. Mostly, it was terrifying. I remember calling home once in mid-game from the Yankee Stadium press box, and hearing "I can't stand any more of this!" when my wife picked up the phone. Did anyone actually enjoy Game 5, out there in Anaheim, when the home-team Angels went ahead by four runs in the first ininig, watched that lead disintegrate in a six-run Yankee seventh, and came back with a winning three of their own in the bottom half? Top and botom, that inning required forty-four minutes, and it felt like a colonoscopy."
On the Yankees' outsized ace:
Too bad, but I'm not going to get around to C.C. Sabathia's sunny looks and pavillion-sized pant and weird, white-toed spikes, or ask batters how they feel about his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment that arrives (he's six-seven and two hundred and ninety pounds) like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.
On Derek Jeter: "Just when you think you appreciate Derek enough, you don't."
One could say the same thing about Angell. My only beef with the piece was that it felt too short, lacking a grander perspective on the regular season and rushing to a close with the suddenness and finality of Game 6 itself, leaving us to face alone what Ken Burns termed "the hard facts of autumn." I wanted to read Angell's unwritten digression about the new Yankee Stadium and his deeper thoughts about Sabathia; when exactly are we going to get those from the nearly nonagenarian bard, whose output is down to these annual summaries? I realize that print is his medium and that the contraction of magazine advertising and the high cost of paper restricts his space. Why not produce a double-length piece for the web that we can, as Alex did, print out and read at our leisure? It seems like an opportunity missed for a guy who's got all too few innings left.
That said, it's still a damn good excuse to plunk down $5 and enjoy one of the old masters. Get thee to a newsstand while you still can, my friends.
Wishing a happy thanksgiving to family, friends and readers. Here's hoping you're enjoying your turkey and stuffing among those whom you love.
Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter may be the Yankees for whom the spotlight shines the brightest, but it was Hideki Matsui who did the dirty work on Wednesday night. Setting a single-game World Series record with six RBI, Matsui collected big hits in his first three at-bats to help the Yankees pounce on Pedro Martinez and the Phillies early, building up a 7-1 lead by the end of the fifth inning. As the Yankees did two nights earlier when they found themselves in an early hole, the Phillies made a game of it by summoning a brief hint of their offensive firepower, but it was too little, too late. For the first time since 2000, the Yankees are the World Champions.
Matsui, who punched a decisive solo homer off Martinez in Game Two, homered again in his first turn at-bat, this time following a Rodriguez walk which led off the inning (oh, those bases on balls) to give the Yankees a 2-0 lead. An inning later, with two outs, the bases loaded and Martinez's night going down in flames, he stroked a two-run single to widen the lead to 4-1. In the fifth inning, with one out, two on, and another Yankee run having crossed the plate, he greeted J.A. Happ with a two-run double to right-center to expand the lead to 7-1. I believe he also demonstrated his heretofore unknown prowess as a tenor by singing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch, but I could be wrong, as by that point I was busy counting the remaining outs on my fingers.
For his performance, Matsui was named the World Series MVP, becoming the first designated hitter ever to win the award. Though he made just three starts and 14 plate appearances in the series, his .615/.643/1.385 showing (8-for-13 with a double and three home runs) ranked as the Yankees' most potent offensive force. Their lineup had its share of complementary performances, including Derek Jeter (.407/.429/.519), Johnny Damon (.364/.440/.455 and the series' most memorable play, his mad dash to third base in Game Four) and of course the ghost-chasing Rodriguez (.250/.423/.550 and six RBI, including the Game Four winner), but it was Matsui who not only led the team with eight RBI but was the only Bronx Bomber to hit more than one bomb, or to collect more than one game-winning hit. His showing was somewhat bittersweet, as it came in what well may have been his final appearance in pinstripes given his pending free agency and the Yankees' need to clear the DH spot for the aging stars above his pay grade. It left absolutely no doubt that the man can be a viable component on a championship team, so wherever he winds up next, Godspeed, Godzilla.
I took a special pleasure in Matsui's showing, as on Wednesday's Toledo radio hit, I told host Norm Wamer that the Matsui-Martinez matchup was the key to the game given the pitcher's struggles with lefties. It didn't take long for that call to make me look smart, as Matsui and the rest of the Yankee lineup made Pedro's night a short one. The 38-year-old pitcher simply couldn't muster the magic he'd summoned in Game Two, getting significantly fewer strikes on both his fastball and his changeup.
Meanwhile, Andy Pettitte gave the Yankees a dogged effort on three days' rest, yielding just one run through the first five innings even as his strike zone was squeezed by home plate umpire Joe West. He gave up a two-run homer to Ryan Howard in the sixth before departing, but that marked the big slugger's only blast of the series, and it was the only one of the eight yielded by the Yankees' lefties which came with a man on base. His showing marked the third time this October that he gotten the win in a series-clinching game (matching Derek Lowe's 2004 run), the sixth time in his career that he'd done so, and the second time he'd done so in a World Series (1998 being the other occasion). Though he's benefited from a career spent amid the three-round playoff format, he leads all pitchers in postseason starts (40), innings (249), and wins (18), and his 3.90 ERA is a ringer for his career mark. I don't believe he's done enough to reach the Hall of Fame once those credentials are placed alongside the rest of what he's accomplished in his 15-year career — he's a Clydesdale, not a thoroughbred, lacking a Cy Young and a whole host of statistical achievements which identify the game's top starters — but the man's earned his five rings.
The real difference between the two teams, ultimately, came down to the man who closed the door on the Phillies, Mariano Rivera:
Consider how closely matched the overall performances of the two rotations were, regardless of the number of days' rest or the handedness, and the bullpens, minus the Sandman:
Split IP H ER BB SO ERA
PHI SP 36.1 32 21 11 36 5.20
NYY SP 34.1 28 19 20 33 4.98
PHI RP 15.2 17 10 7 20 5.74
NYY RP* 13.1 13 8 4 14 5.40
Rivera 5.1 3 0 2 3 0.00
* Except Rivera
Mariano Rivera now has a 0.74 ERA across 133.1 postseason innings with a 107/21 strikeout to walk ratio and just two home runs allowed. He is the greatest closer of all time, and arguably the greatest postseason performer as well. The closers of each of the other seven teams which reached the 2009 postseason faltered at least once when the money was on the table, and those mistakes ultimately proved fatal. Rivera, as in three other World Series, was the last man standing. Along with Pettitte, Jeter and Posada — the "Core Four," they're called — he's now one of four Yankees to have earned seven pennants and five World Series rings dating back to 1996.
Old guard, new guard, it was all a gas watching the Yankees win. In doing so they vanquished a very strong and very special Phillies team, one which had been the first one since the 2000-2001 Yankees to repeat as pennant winers, and the first NL team since the 1995-1996 Braves to do so (an error I made in the article, acknowledged in the comments thread, identified the 1975-1976 Reds as such). One which, over the course of the past two Octobers, has given me a considerable amount of frustration as they steamrolled the Dodgers and stretched the Yankees nearly to the limit. As I wrote in the BP piece, it's easier to run across I-95 four times a night than get through the middle of that batting order.
So congrats to the Yankees, their organization and their fans, particularly to those of you who've followed their exploits via my work in this space and at BP. After writing to deadline for each of the Series' six games, I'm going to take a few days to catch my breath and dig into my annual winter workload, but you can rest assured there's plenty more baseball content to come from me during this offseason.
The Yankees begain the game in a hole because Burnett laid an egg, surrendering six runs in two-plus innings. Pitching on three days' rest, he was unable to match the brilliance of his seven-inning, one-run Game Two start, not because of fatigue — his average fastball and curveball velocities were higher according to Brooks Baseball — but because he was unable to fool the Phillies with his curveball, in part because home plate ump Dana DeMuth's strike zone wasn't as wide as that of Jeff Nelson. Breaking down the breaking balls thrown in the two starts:
Game Tot Ball SS SL F I
Two 45 20 8 7 7 3
Five 16 10 3 0 2 1
For the unfamiliar, SS is strikes swinging, SL is strikes looking, F is foul balls, I is in play. Whereas Burnett generated not-in-play strikes on 22 out of 45 curves in Game Two (49 percent), he did so on just five out of 16 (31 percent) in Game Five, none of them called strikes. Five of his nine strikeouts in Game Two ended on a curveball, three swinging and two looking, as compared to one of his two walks. He got just one strikeout via curveball (swinging) last night, and two of his four walks.
The result was a nasty, brutish and short start that left the Yankees in a 5-1 hole by the time he departed. [Chase] Utley's homer, which followed a Jimmy Rollins single and a Shane Victorino hit by pitch on a bunt attempt, came on just his eighth pitch of the night. After escaping the second inning unscathed, he walked Utley and Ryan Howard — never, ever a good idea — to start the third, then yielded RBI singles to Jayson Werth and Raul Ibañez. That was enough for Yankees manager Joe Girardi, who called upon David Robertson. He retired both Pedro Feliz and Carlos Ruiz, but the latter's grounder scored Werth to give the Phillies a formidable five-run lead.
Utley has been unreal in this series, tying Reggie Jackson's 1977 World Series record of five home runs. Until his first-inning blast, however, all of them — indeed, all seven of the Phillies' homers in the series — had been solo shots. Colleague John Perrotto had a nice piece on Utley at BP today.
The Yankees had their chances against Cliff Lee, chipping away at the 6-1 lead until it became 8-5. They even brought the tying run to the plate twice in the ninth inning, only to have Derek Jeter ground into a double play and Mark Teixeira strike out. The series now comes back to New York, with Pedro Martinez slated to take on Andy Pettitte, the latter on three days' rest. Of course, the Yanks' decision to use a three-man rotation is under scrutiny:
Burnett's short-rest implosion raises the inevitable question regarding the Yankees' three-man rotation plan for the series. [CC] Sabathia wasn't terribly sharp on three days' rest in Game Four, throwing fewer pitches than in any of his other postseason outings, and yielding more than two runs for the first time. He'll go on three days' rest again in Game Seven if the series goes that far. While the Yankees haven't officially announced that Andy Pettitte will do the same in Game Six, they have little alternative. Potential fourth starter Chad Gaudin, whom some suggested should start Game Five to keep Burnett on regular rest, simply isn't cut out to face the Phillies' lefty-heavy lineup:
That's a ticket to a beatdown right there, given that Gaudin can't even strike out as many lefties as he walks. In last night's roundtable, other readers suggested the Yankees do a so-called bullpen game for Game Five; again, a bad idea given that it's inadvisable to punt a World Series game by expecting the lion's share of the innings to come from the bottom half of the team's pitching staff. Prior to last night, none of the Yankees' non-closers — Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, Alfredo Aceves, Robertson et al — had given the Yankees more than three outs without allowing a run since Game Three of the ALCS; thus far this postseason only Hughes and Robertson had done so even once. That the Yankees got three such efforts last night from Robertson, Aceves and Hughes doesn't mean they could have done so out of the gate, as those were low-leverage innings with at least a three-run deficit each time.
No, the Yankees are without realistic alternatives to the three-man plan because of earlier failures on the part of Girardi, pitching coach Dave Eiland, and general manager Brian Cashman. They handled Chamberlain so poorly that they got a 7.69 ERA from him over his final 11 starts. They dickered with Sergio Mitre, who gave them nine starts with a 7.16 ERA. Cashman could have dealt for Jon Garland during the post-deadline waiver period just as he did Gaudin (Jose Contreras, Scott Kazmir and Carl Pavano, the other starters of note to change teams during August, weren't fits for a variety of reasons, most of them obvious). He could have dealt for a more reliable fourth starter at the July 31 deadline. He didn't, and because of that, the Yankees reached this stage with just three reliable starters. The record of such starters isn't exactly promising, as I pointed out in my preview: coming into the year, short-rested starters in the wild card era had made 86 postseason starts, averaging just 5.4 innings per start, with a 4.59 ERA, a 21-34 record for the starters, and a 31-55 record (.360 winning percentage) for their teams. Still, given the experience of the Yankees' big three on pitching on short rest (30 starts, an average of over six innings per, and a collective ERA under 4.00), it was hardly the worst plan in the world. Putting as many innings as possible in the hands of your top pitchers is what wins championships, and the Yankees are still win away from doing so.
According to Clay Davenport's Monte Carlo simulations at the BP Postseason Odds report, the Yankees still have an 83 percent chance of winning the series based upon the home field advantage and the actual starting pitchers involved. That may be overstating things, since the program can't see who's on three days' rest, but the odds are still in New York's favor.
Johnny Damon's mad ninth-inning dash from second to third once he realized no one was covering will go down in the annals of World Series lore, but it was Alex Rodriguez who was the real story last night. From my writeup at Baseball Prospectus:
Last night, in the ninth inning of Game Four of the World Series, Alex Rodriguez put the lie to the seemingly endless string of complaints that have dogged him since 2004 regarding his ability to come through in the clutch. Never mind the fact that 15 of his 30 homers this year either tied the score or gave the Yankees the lead. Never mind the fact he had already bopped six homers during the Yankees' current postseason run, early-inning homers to kick off the scoring or late-inning — even extra-inning — homers to tie games. For some of his critics, that could never be enough, simply because he's the highest paid player in the game, and a socially awkward one at that.
Last night, in the ninth inning of Game Four of the World Series, Alex Rodriguez came to the plate with two outs and the opportunity to drive in a run to give his team the lead in a World Series game — the kind of situation just about anyone who's ever played baseball has daydreamed about, whether in their own backyards as a schoolkid or when putting pen to ink on a multi-million dollar deal. And he did. And it was good. Knowing that with a runner on third base he could expect a fastball, Rodriguez ripped a 92 MPH Brad Lidge offering into the right field corner to bring home Johnny Damon, restoring the lead that the Yankees had held from the top of the first to the bottom of the eighth, only to fritter it away. The Yanks would add two more runs on a Jorge Posada single one batter later, but it was Rodriguez who drove in the decisive run, giving the Bronx Bombers a commanding 3-1 lead in the World Series. It doesn't get much more clutch than that.
...Johnny Damon's dash is what will likely be remembered years from now, and a well-deserved memory it will be, particularly after the tenacious at-bat in which he worked his way on base. But he's not the only hero of this ballgame. On the night after Halloween, Alex Rodriguez chased away some ghosts with his first World Series game-winning hit. He's now hitting .348/.483/.804 with six homers and 15 RBI this fall, and after all the drama that has dogged him since reports of his steroid usage broke, he produced on the game's biggest stage in the biggest moment of his career. It may never be enough for some if his critics — it wasn't Game Seven in the bottom of the ninth with the Yankees trailing, and he didn't pledge to donate his entire annual salary to an orphanage in the postgame jubilation, after all — but those left standing to point a finger at him for being somehow unclutch are completely out of ammunition now.
And the Yankees are one win away from their 27th World Championship. The path to their fourth victory isn't as straightforward as it might otherwise be, given that tonight they'll face ace Cliff Lee, who nearly shut them out in Game One, while hoping that a less-than-fully-rested A.J. Burnett can string together his second straight glowing start, this time against a lineup that got a good look at his repertoire and his pattern of first pitch strikes. It may not be the ideal scenario for the Yankees, but it's one for which the Phillies would certainly trade.
Damon's dash really was something to behold, one of the crazier plays I've ever seen, and also one of the most heads-up. What amazed me after Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz two-hopped the ball to Pedro Feliz (the third baseman covering second during the shift on Mark Teixeira) was that he was so close when Damon made his break, perhaps less than three feet away. While Damon wasn't likely to lose any footrace to a guy who hasn't stolen a base since 2007, I have to think that a desperate lunge might have been enough to tag him out.
In any event, we've got a ballgame tonight, possibly the last one of the year. The boys and girls at BP, including yours truly, will be chatting it up starting at 8 PM Eastern. Check it out.
There's been a lot of talk about the root of Hamels' woes lately. As I wrote in my series preview, BP colleague Matt Swartz found that the difference between his 2008 and 2009 performances largely boiled down to fluctuating results on balls in play. While that may be convincing on some level, it doesn't explain why dating back to September 23rd, Hamels has now made seven starts, none of them quality, putting up a 7.32 ERA while allowing 2.3 HR/9. A look at his splits, however, is more telling: while he held opponents to a .228/.270/.388 line in their first plate appearance of the game, they hit .301/.342/.473 when seeing him in their remaining plate appearances. Last night was more of the same, as he struggled mightily once he tried establishing a curveball during his second time through the order. The Yankees went 5-for-10 with two walks, two doubles and a homer (.500/.583/1.000) after that first time through, turning the game around in short order.
Besides Hamels, the Phillies are having a few other problems. From my latest at BP:
As in the first two rounds of the postseason, they're again having trouble hitting left-handers, with the occasional big blow disguising their inconsistency. In Game One, they were 5-for-28 against CC Sabathia, Damaso Marte, and Phil Coke, while last night they were 5-for-25 against Pettitte and Marte. Six of those 10 hits have been for extra bases, but only one — a ninth-inning double off Phil Coke in Game One — has come with runners on base, and their overall line against lefties in the series (.189/.268/.453) is similarly shaped to that of the first two rounds (.194/.322/.444). Take away Jayson Werth's production and for the entire postseason, the rest of the lineup is hitting a fairly tame .174/.304/.383 against southpaws. With Sabathia and Pettitte lined up to pitch as many as three of the remaining four games (if the series stretches that far), this remains a huge problem for the Phillies.
Not that it's the only one. The lineup's first four hitters — Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino, [Chase] Utley, and [Ryan] Howard — are a combined 8-for-45 thus far against the Yankees. Howard, who whiffed six times in a row in Games Two and Three, already has nine strikeouts, three shy of tying Willie Wilson's 1980 World Series record. He hasn't walked in the World Series yet, either. Rollins, whose pre-series prediction (Phillies in five) has already been rendered impossible, is hitting an anemic .235/.316/.294 for the entire postseason. Further down the lineup, [Raul] Ibañez has struggled this fall as well (.233/.313/.395), to say nothing of Pedro Feliz (.143/.182/.310).
With Phillies manager Charlie Manuel having decided not to bring back ace Cliff Lee on three days' rest given that he hasn't done so once in his career — a lunkheaded excuse, particularly given that Manuel pushed him to 122 pitches while protecting leads of 4-0 and 6-0 in the final two innings of his brilliant Game One start — the Yanks have the upper hand in tonight's matchup pitting Sabathia versus Joe Blanton:
[Blanton]'s a thoroughly capable number four starter who put up a career-best strikeout rate this year (7.5 per nine), but it came at the expense of a career-high homer rate (1.4 per nine) and a career-low groundball rate (42 percent). Some of that is simply the shift in leagues and ballparks, from Oakland's pitcher-friendly Coliseum to the hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park, but it's nonetheless an unsettling trend. Also unsettling is the fact that the righty yielded a .270/.321/.469 line against righties, compared to .252/.320/.401 against lefties. The Yankees themselves have shown more muscle against righties than lefties this fall (.252/.342/.450, compared to .255/.346/.418). They're poised to create another souvenir or two tonight.
The bottom line is that the Yankees come back with their ace tonight against the Phils' fourth-best starter, one who's got matchup problems against the Bronx Bomber lineup. While the series is by no means over, the two games to one margin and the way the rotations line up going forward makes this their series to lose.
The Yankees have also announced that A.J. Burnett will start Game Five on three days' rest. Barring what Joe Girardi termed any "unforeseen things," they'll stick with the three-man rotation from here onwards.
I attended the game with my friend Julie, and our seats were in the left field bleachers, providing a fitting bookend to the season given that the two of us were also in the bleachers for the Yankees' April 3 exhibition against the Cubs, the new ballpark's unofficial opener. Raising the stakes even more was the fact that Pedro Martinez started for the Phillies against the Yanks' A.J. Burnett:
For as much baggage as Burnett brought to the party, his opposite number, Pedro Martinez, brought more — an epic history of battles during his days with the Red Sox, highlights (his Yankee Stadium record 17-strikeout performance in 1999, the Red Sox's 2004 ALCS comeback) and lowlights (his 2003 ALCS meltdown, his promise to "Wake up the Bambino, I'll drill him in the ass," and the taunts of "Who's Your Daddy?") aplenty.
But the Pedro who took the hill for the Phillies is a different Pedro, five years and several miles per hour removed from the end of his Boston tenure, and nearly a decade beyond a peak that can stand with any pitcher in the game's history, from Walter Johnson to Sandy Koufax to Roger Clemens. He's older, sadder—his father died of cancer last year—but almost certainly wiser. No longer able to summon superhuman velocity, he showed during his NLCS start against the Dodgers (a rich enough tableau in its own right) that he could still baffle hitters by keeping them off balance, moving their eye level and changing speeds, hitting nearly every increment on the radar gun between the mid-70s and the low-90s while artfully working in and out of the strike zone across seven shutout innings.
Martinez held the Yankees to one run through the first five innings, striking out six and yielding only one run on a solo shot by Mark Teixeira into the Yankees' bullpen to lead off the fourth. But even when he was missing bats, he was running up his pitch count; his first four K's cost him 27 pitches. He surrendered another solo homer, this time to Hideki Matsui, on his 96th pitch.
Martinez finished the inning with his pitch count at 98, but much to our surprise, Phillies manager Charlie Manuel sent him back out for the seventh, apparently forgetting the hard lessons of the 2003 ALCS Game Seven. Martinez yielded singles to Jerry Hairston Jr. and Miguel Cabrera to lead off the seventh, with Hairston's pinch-runner Brett Gardner going from first to third, at which point Manuel finally went and got the wily, wiry 38-year-old. For all the taunts Martinez had endured on the night and over the years from the Yankee Stadium crowds — particularly in the bleachers — it was an incredibly poignant moment. If this was the sun setting on Martinez's career, then it was one hell of a sunset, and I was determined to appreciate its brilliance:
I don't care who you root for, it was impossible not to feel for Martinez as he slowly strode off the Yankee Stadium mound, perhaps for the last time in his storied career. The crowd in the bleachers jeered him rabidly, but I could only stand and applaud, doffing my cap not only at the magnificent effort he'd mustered, but all of the pain and pleasure his years of battling the Yankees had brought. At least from this writer's vantage point, never was there an opposing player who made for better blog fodder. My season at Yankee Stadium wasn't the only thing that had come full circle.
Looking back at a recording of the game a day later, the close-ups of Martinez's face are priceless. Bated breath to collect his emotions before walking off the mound. A raised finger and a glance skyward as he headed towards the visiting dugout on the third base side. A head bowed, and then, as he approached the dugout, chin raised with a genuine smile [pic], perhaps at the large sign held by a Yankees fan near the dugout that read: "Daddy's Got a New House." Unable to withstand the lure of consumer capitalism in favor of a poignant moment in baseball history for one single second more, Fox cut to a car commercial. Perhaps their producer had something in his eye.
Their lead expanded to 3-1, the Yankees called upon the great Mariano Rivera to make his second two-inning save of the week. He went on to close out the game and help the Yankees even the series, and while there was so much more to say about his performance and that of Burnett, what stuck with me was Martinez, particularly as the reports of his post-game press conference emerged. Not to be confused with his pregame conference from the day before in which he made a bold declaration regarding the fans in the Bronx:
Q. You've had a unique relationship with the fans in the Bronx over the years. Why do you think that is? Have you thought about that over your career? And what about it do you enjoy?
PEDRO MARTINEZ: I don't know if you realize this, but because of you guys in some ways, I might be at times the most influential player that ever stepped in Yankee Stadium. I can honestly say that. I mean, I have been a big fan of baseball for a long time, since I was a kid. My first ball I ever got from a Big League player I actually got to purchase in Dodger Stadium in a silent auction, was Reggie Jackson. I was actually a big fan of the Yankees, too.
For some reason with all the hype and different players that have passed by, maybe because I played for the Red Sox is probably why you guys made it such a big deal every time I came in, but you know, I have a good bond with the people. After playing in New York, I went to realize something: New York fans are very passionate and very aggressive. But after it all, after you take your uniform off and you deal with the people, they're real human beings. It's all just being fans.
I have all the respect in the world for the way they enjoy being fans. Sometimes they might be giving you the middle finger, just like they will be cursing you and telling you what color underwear you're wearing. All those things you can hear when you're a fan. But at the end of the day, they're just great fans that want to see the team win. I don't have any problem with that.
Q. Could you just walk us through what your feelings were? A long rehab for you over a year, you come in, you pitched a great game in the NLCS, and then tonight. I know when you're pitching, you're not thinking about that stuff, but now that you got back to a World Series game and pitched so well in it, talk about what's going through your mind about the whole year of rehab really.
PEDRO MARTINEZ: You know, regardless of what happened, the fact that I was the loser today for the game, I'm extremely proud and happy being able to participate, compete against a real, real good team, a very solid team, be able to put my team in position to catch up or win that game, and at the same time tell myself that I made the right decision by coming back and getting this opportunity, putting myself in the position to get an opportunity to pitch in the World Series.
It was a real good game. It was a real baseball game.
Q. As you were walking off the field, you were hearing it from the Yankee fans and the TV camera caught you breaking out into smile. Can you talk about as you were walking off the field kind of what was going through your mind in the new Yankee Stadium?
PEDRO MARTINEZ: Yeah, you said it right, it's a new Yankee Stadium, but the fans remain the fans. They're going to give you — like I remember one guy sitting right in front of the front row with his daughter, sitting with his daughter, and his daughter in one arm, and a cup of beer in the other hand and saying all kinds of nasty stuff. I just told him, "Your daughter is right beside you. It's a little girl. It's a shame you're saying all these things."
I had to stop and tell him because I'm a father myself, and God, how can you be so dumb to do those kind of things in front of your child? What kind of example are you setting?
But the fans, I enjoy that, because at the bottom, I know I played for the Mets, I know they really want to root for me. It's just that I don't play for the Yankees, that's all. I've always been a good competitor, and they love that. They love the fact that I compete. I'm a New Yorker, as well. If I was on the Yankees, I'd probably be like a king over here. (Laughter.)
That's not the case right now, and it's going to be that way.
As you'd expect, there were plenty of good articles about Pedro Martinez to go around, both before and after the game. Jonah Keri had some great stuff about Pedro's days with the Expos. The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Futterman provided great context for both of Martinez's press conferences while comparing him to Reggie Jackson and calling his comments "subversive." The Faster Times' Lisa Swan predicted the postgamer would be a doozy, no matter what the outcome (she also did a nice retrospective of great Martinez quotes as he was returning to the majors in August). Esquire's Charles Pierce to compared him to Luis Tiant, the hero ace of an earlier Red Sox era, for his ability to get by on guile and guts.
The legend goes that back when Martinez was breaking in with the Dodgers, manager Tommy Lasorda felt he was too small to withstand the rigors of starting. In retrospect, it seems clear he was right, at least if that meant starting for Lasorda, who broke many a promising young Dodger starter - Doug Rau, Rick Rhoden, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and older brother Ramon Martinez. Who's to say the baseball world wouldn't have been deprived of a Hall of Fame talent and one of the game's great personalities had he not been traded to the Expos? Ultimately, it was in the best interests of baseball.
In yesterday's chat, Bronx Banter's Alex Belth asked me, "Is there any particular pitching match-up that you are looking forward to in the series?" I responded that the matchup I was most looking forward to was between CC Sabathia and Ryan Howard, particularly given the prospect of the big man pitching three times for the Yankees in a seven-game series, and the slugger's less-than-sterling reputation against southpaws. "I think that matchup will tell us something about what's going to happen over the next four to seven games," I wrote.
If that's the case, the Yankees are in trouble. Howard stepped to the plate with two out and a man on in the first inning on Wednesday night. Sabathia had gotten quick outs on a Jimmy Rollins bunt and a Shane Victorino popup, and was one strike away from retiring Chase Utley when he suddenly lost the strike zone with three straight balls. Though he got ahead of Howard on a called strike, the slugger roped his second pitch into the right field corner for a double, and Utley might have scored had it not been for Nick Swisher playing the carom perfectly. Sabathia then walked Jayson Werth to load the bases, and only escaped the inning when Raul Ibañez grounded a 3-1 pitch to Robinson Cano to end the threat.
During the first two rounds of the playoffs, Howard went 2-for-11 against lefty pitching, but those two hits were huge, a two-run double off Clayton Kershaw in Game One of the NLCS which expanded the Phillies' lead from 3-1 to 5-1 and chased the struggling southpaw, and a two-run homer off Randy Wolf in the first inning of Game Four. The Phillies as a team got just 14 hits off of lefties during those first two rounds, but seven of them were for extra bases, including five homers, producing an uneven .194/.322/.444 line.
They only got four hits off Sabathia in seven innings, as he settled down after that shaky 27-pitch first frame, but two of those were solo homers by Utley. Which isn't to say Sabathia was all that sharp. In marked contrast to Andy Pettitte's religious devotion to first-pitch strikes in Game Six of the ALCS (20 out of 25), the big man got ahead of just 12 of 27 hitters, at one point starting with ball one to seven hitters in a row, including Utley on his first homer.
The two Utley jacks would have been enough, given how well Cliff Lee pitched for Philadelphia. In this battle of former Indians Cy Young winners who were traded the following summer — Mark Shapiro's worst nightmare, basically — there was never any doubt who had the upper hand. Lee dominated, striking out seven of the first 14 hitters he faced: Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira (twice), Alex Rodriguez (twice), Hideki Matsui and Jorge Posada. He also made two plays in the field which showed how in control he was, visibly sneering while making a basket catch on a sixth-inning Johnny Damon popup that scarcely forced him to budge from his landing spot, and snaring an eighth-inning Robinson Cano grounder behind his back.
The record shows that Lee only got first-pitch strikes to 16 out of 32 batters, but he went to 0-2 eight times, whereas his opposite number only got there four times. The irony is that Lee also went to 2-0 seven times, while Sabathia only got there five times, and thus ran up his pitch count. There wasn't all that much separating the two pitchers, and over the course of a seven-game series in which the two starters are slated to pitch on three days' rest in their next two turns, it may count in the Yankees' favor that Sabathia, the experienced one in such matters, threw only 113 pitches, while Lee, who's never taken the ball on short rest, threw 122 pitches. Whether or not that's a strike against Charlie Manuel remains to be seen.
Despite Lee's dominance, the Yankees still had a chance to keep things close. In last night's BP roundtable, I suggested Joe Girardi bring in Mariano Rivera to face Utley and Howard in the seventh inning after Phil Hughes walked both Rollins and Victorino to start the frame given the persistence of Rivera's favorable reverse platoon split due to the break of his cut fastball against lefty hitters. Girardi didn't, because managers don't think like they did twenty or thirty years ago, when they would call their top reliever into a ballgame when they felt it was on the line, regardless of inning. Firemen, they were called, because they were there to put out the fire instead of merely collect the last three outs and the statistical cherry on top, and we wore an onion on our belts as was the style at the time... Check the postseason game logs of Goose Gossage and Rollie Fingers; Bob Lemon and Dick Williams weren't afraid to call their numbers early, and that's part of the reason they won championships. In any event, even given the emphasis we place on better bullpen management at BP, at least a few of my colleagues disagreed, both at the time and in retrospect. As Joe Sheehan wrote today, "You're not going to start using Rivera as if he is Dan Quisenberry and we're all hanging out in Lee jeans and Adidas with fat laces." Girardi went to lefty Damaso Marte, who got two outs but allowed Rollins to advance to third on a fly ball to right field. Giriardi again could have called upon Rivera, but no, he went to David Robertson, who spent the first two rounds as the low man on the totem pole. The kid walked Werth to load the bases, then surrendered a two-run single by Ibañez that was essentially the ballgame.
The Win Probability Added figures at FanGraphs, the Yankees' chances at winning stood at just 14.8 percent to start the inning given the 2-0 deficit. They dropped to 9.9 percent after the two walks, climbed back up to 14.9 percent by the time of the second out, and crashed to 4.3 percent with Ibañez's hit. Thanks and good night.
Anyway, I have the good fortune of holding a ticket to tonight's Game Two, which pits Pedro Martinez against A.J. Burnett. Joe Girardi has already announced that he'll start Jerry Hairston (an Enrique Wilson-like 10-for-27 lifetime against Pedro, for the third-highest batting average of any active player with at least 25 PA against him, though the two haven't faced each other since 2004) in right field instead of Nick Swisher, who's mired in an 11-for-77 slump with two homers and four RBI dating back to September 16. He'll also start Jose Molina again instead of Posada, though Molina was helpless to prevent another early-inning meltdown by A.J. in Game Five of the ALCS. The righty's struggled at the beginning of games this year:
If a personal valet catcher can't prevent that from happening, then what the hell good is he? I guess we'll soon find out.
Oh and on the subject of Pedro's ancient history, in the second half of today's BP column I take a look at the history of pitchers who started a postseason game for their teams after making less than 10 appearances for them during the regular season. Lots of recognizable names dot the list — Don Sutton, Tommy John, Rick Reuschel, David Cone, David Wells, Ramon Martinez, Oliver Perez — but Martinez's face-off with Vicente Padilla marked the first time two such pitchers faced each other. There's no real take-home as to what to expect tonight, but it was fun to research nonetheless.
While you're there, check out Cliff's excellent piece on the 1950 World Series and its future ramificiations:
To give you a sense of just how long it’s been since the Yankees swept Philadelphia’s Whiz Kids, the 1950 World Series was the last Fall Classic to feature two all-white teams.
That fact is not as trivial as it might sound. The Yankees’ struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s had several sources, including the institution of the amateur draft and the corporate ownership of CBS, but their failure to properly exploit the African American talent pool was undeniably a contributing factor. When they finally emerged from that slumber, it was with black stars such as Mickey Rivers, Willie Randolph, Chris Chambliss, Roy White, Oscar Gamble, and Gamble’s replacement, Reggie Jackson.
Similarly, the Phillies’ surprising pennant in 1950 fed the organization’s resistance to integration. The 1950 Whiz Kids got their name not only because they won the pennant, but because they were the youngest team in the National League on both sides of the ball. In fact, the 1950 Phillies were the youngest pennant winners ever. The Phillies’ oldest regular was first baseman Eddie Waitkus (the player whose shooting the previous year inspired The Natural). Just one of the six men to make more than ten starts for them was over the age of 26, and future Hall of Famers Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts were both just 23.
Assuming that young squad would only get better with age, the Phillies didn’t even begin scouting black players until 1954, when Roy Hamey took over as general manager following four seasons in which the Phillies finished between third and fifth place. The Phillies didn’t field their first black player until 1957, didn’t have an African-American starter until 1961, and didn’t have an African-American star until the arrival of Richie Allen in 1964.
As i wrote in It Ain't Over, the teams that integrated early dominated then National League for more than a decade after the color barrier was broken. The Dodgers won seven pennants between 1947 and 1959, the Braves won three, and the Giants two. Those Phils were the only breakthrough, their franchise was the last NL club to integrate, and they wouldn't even get back to the World Series until 1980. Serves 'em right to suffer.
One correction to an assertion I made within this video: Pedro Martinez has one postseason start on three days’ rest, in the 1999 AL Division Series opener against the Indians. He left after four innings due to a back strain, then famously returned four days later to pitch six hitless innings of relief to close out the series in Game Five.
Regardless, he ain’t going on three in this series.
I had the pleasure of viewing the festivities from Section 406 in high right field:
After the previous night's rain and the previous weekend's chill, the weather was incredibly cooperative, with the game-time temperature announced as 58 degrees. I know this because we were one section over from the auxiliary press box, where a special PA feed fed the writers a stream of tidbits ("Alex Rodriguez now has an 11-game postseason hitting streak," etc.).
Pettitte came out firing, getting ahead of the Angels' hitters in the first inning and striking out Bobby Abreu, but the former Yankee gave the Halos the lead in the third inning with a two-out RBI single to capitalize on a Jeff Mathis double. Meabnwhile, the Yankees had their opportunities to score early against Angels starter Joe Saunders, leaving two men on base in the first, three in the second, and one in the third.
They broke through in the fourth inning, which Robinson Cano led off with a walk — the first time the Yanks had gotten the leadoff hitter aboard thus far. Nick Swisher broke out of an 0-for-12 slump with a single, Melky Cabrera laid down a sacrifice bunt, and Derek Jeter walked to load the bases with just one out. Damon, who'd grounded out weakly with the bases loaded to end the second, this time delivered with a two-run single up the middle. Mark Teixeira reached on an infield single to shortstop Erick Aybar that should have been a double-play ball.
Facing Alex Rodriguez with the bases loaded was something Saunders clearly wanted no part of. Saunders issued a five-pitch walk which scored the Yanks' third run and spelled the end of his brief night. His line: 3.1 7 3 3 5 0. It might have been worse had reliever Darren Oliver not gotten Jorge Posada to ground into an inning-ending double play.
With the Yankees holding a 3-1 lead, I started counting down the outs, at least in my head, working backwards from Mariano Rivera through the suddenly shaky setup corps and back to Pettitte. Fortunately, Andy was dandy, throwing first-pitch strikes to 20 of the 25 hitters he faced, whiffing six while allowing just one walk. He had retired nine in a row before the Angels mounted their biggest threat of the night in the sixth, when Torii Hunter reached on an infield single and Vlad Guerrero blooped a double down the right field line. The Angels looked poised to tie the game when Kendry Morales smoked a ball up the middle, but Pettitte knocked down the hot smash and calmly threw to first for the third out. Money.
He departed to a thunderous ovation with one out and one on in the seventh, with Joba Chamberlain coming on. Chamberlain offered little of his usual drama in either the positive or negative sense — no fist-pumping strikeouts, no well-hit balls following ineffectual nibbling around the plate. He kept the ball in the infield and got two grounders, one a fielder's choice (via a puzzling move by Angels manager Mike Scioscia to pinch-hit for the red-hot Jeff Mathis with infielder Maicer Izturis) and the other on a grounder to Derek Jeter.
With six outs to go, Yankees manager Joe Girardi decided to dispense with all further middling middlemen and go for the kill, summoning Mariano Rivera. My friend Nick, who'd been wearing his Lou Gehrig pinstriped replica jersey, stripped down to a navy blue Rivera t-shirt which dates back at least one pennant ago. It was a bold move that almost backfired — Girardi's, not Nick's — as the Angels scraped out a run in the eighth on a pair of singles and a groundout, cutting the lead in half while forcing Rivera to throw 21 pitches.
Luckily, the Yankees reclaimed some breathing room. Cano worked another leadoff walk, and then the Angel botched consecutive sacrifice bunts, with Howie Kendrick failing to handle the throw at first base on the first one (Swisher's) and then reliever Scott Kazmir (!) shot-putting the second one (Cabrera's) into foul territory right field as Cano scampered home. One out later, Damon walked to load the bases, and then Teixeira delivered a sacrifice fly to plate the Yankees' fifth and final run.
At this point the crowd — 50,173 strong with hardly an empty seat in sight — was in a total frenzy, on their feet for the entire ninth. Rivera made it look easy for the first two hitters, quickly retiring Kendrick on a grounder to Teixeira, then inducing Juan Rivera to fly out softly to right. Pinch-hitter Gary Matthews Jr., another puzzler from Scioscia, battled Rivera to a full count before Rivera snuck his trademark cutter — a bit high and outside — by him for strike three and the AL pennant. He calmly walked halfway to the plate to hug Posada, then ran to leap onto the dogpile forming near shortstop:
So now the Yankees have inaugurated each of the three editions of Yankee Stadium with a pennant. After all the extraneous drama the new ballpark wrought, it felt strange to be celebrating in that space. The crowd was cheerful but maybe a bit reserved, dispersing rather rapidly compared to the way they lingered at the 1999 World Series clincher, the most momentous occasion I've had the pleasure of attending at any ballpark. Back then the upper deck shook for 90 minutes, and 56,782 fans dogpiled on each other after the final out, singing "New York, New York" and "We Are the Champions" in unison as we watched the players celebrate on the field.
Okay, that's a nearly impossible standard to uphold. I don't think it's because Yankees fans take such a victory for granted, not with a six-year pennant drought, but because they/we know there's bigger game to hunt. Unlike in the old ballpark, it was a genuine breeze to exit even amid the celebration, and it was cool to get a glimpse of the players' champagne-soaked locker-room celebration in the Great Hall:
As the Yankees received their championship trophy, an official photographer even snapped our pictures (yes, I'm too cheap to pay for a non-watermarked version, but that flash flatters no one):
That's a couple of happy campers who enjoyed a pretty great night at the ballpark. Bring on the Phillies!
None of which lessened my disappointment at their loss, but the outcome was hardly in doubt after the fourth inning. Indeed, the script looked all too familiar. From today's writeup:
Vicente Padilla's chariot turned back into a pumpkin last night. An unlikely hero of the Dodgers' playoff run via his two previous starts, he joined Game One starter Clayton Kershaw and Game Three starter Hiroki Kuroda in failing to survive five innings against the Phillies' offensive juggernaut. For the second year in a row, the Dodgers were unceremoniously bounced from the National League Championship Series in five games. Wait 'til next year.
It didn't have to be that way for the Dodgers, who came into the series as the favorites among a broad consensus of writers, gamblers, simulators, and moral degenerates thanks to the home field advantage, fewer questions about their pitching staff, and more righty hitters and lefty pitchers to counter the Phillies' ample supply of lefties. Dodger manager Joe Torre made a hash of his rotation, however, and far more often than not, the pitchers he entrusted failed to deliver. Consider the two rotations' performances:
Team IP H HR BB SO ERA
Dodgers 21.2 22 6 10 15 8.72
Philllies 30.2 24 6 4 22 2.93
The Dodgers had four full days of rest between playoff rounds, giving Torre the chance to align his rotation to best advantage, so that line above constitutes epic failure in both planning and execution. Subtract Padilla's Game Two gem as well as that of his opposite number, Pedro Martinez, and the two ERAs become 13.19 and 3.80. If you're the Dodgers, it should go without saying that that's no way to win a pennant.
The problem, ultimately, is that as strong as their rotation was — and they finished with the league's second-best ERA and tied for third in SNLVAR — the Dodgers lacked a true number one starter who could be depended upon to pitch deep into a ballgame come hell or high water and to make multiple starts in a competitive series (i.e., one longer than four games). The 21-year old Kershaw and 24-year-old Chad Billingsley, who was bypassed for a start, may both eventually develop into that stud, but neither is there yet. Randy Wolf, the Dodgers' most dependable starter this year, isn't that stud, either. To expect Kuroda, whose 2008 postseason performance outweighed his recent health woes in Torre's eyes, or Padilla, a free-talent pickup whose ERA has been six percent worse than the park-adjusted league average over the past six years, to rise to live up to such expectations was asking too much.
The Dodgers did have a few chances to make a game of it, but Torre managed from back on his heels throughout the game and indeed the series, failing to give Padilla an earlier hook and notably failing to get pinch-hitter Jim Thome to the plate with the bases loaded even at the expense of one of his trusted but underperforming position players. I suggested in last night's roundtable that one might have trouble finding an active manager with the cojones to bat Thome for one of his regulars, but a Casey Stengel or an Earl Weaver wouldn't have hesitated. Here's Joe's take:
...[W]hen I think about the Dodgers' failures — Torre's failures — I will recall an isolation shot on Jim Thome, alone in the on-deck circle, studying Ryan Madson, just as he'd studied so many pitchers before hitting his 564 career home runs, including 23 this season. I'll think about a team down five runs with five outs to go, with the bases loaded, with a glimmer of a hint of a ghost of a chance against a bullpen just aching to be exposed. I'll think about the decision to let first Russell Martin and then Casey Blake try their luck against Madson, someone who, throughout his career, has been tougher against righties than lefties. I'll think about how, when you start the eighth inning down six runs, you just hope for the opportunity to make a big score with one swing, to make a game of it, to pull off a miracle. I'll think about that miracle never getting closer than that on-deck circle.
I watched last night's game with friends, among them Jay Jaffe, who says that no manager in baseball would have made the move I insist was so obviously the correct one. Perhaps he's right. I could only come up with one name, and after sleeping on it, I don't think even he would do it. But winning a championship isn't something you do by following the path of the other 29 guys. It's something you do by making the right move at the right time to win that game. The right move was to get Jim Thome and his power to the plate with a chance to make it 9-8 with the top of the order batting in the ninth inning against Brad Lidge. Maybe Manuel goes to Scott Eyre (which is why you hit Thome for Martin, rather than wait for Blake), and even if he does, well, that worked out in Game Two. But you don't go down with Martin and Blake without getting 564 home runs and a .557 slugging average to the plate. The entire reason you put Jim Thome on the roster is so that maybe he can get you four desperately needed runs with one swing of the bat. Whatever the considerable skills of both Martin and Blake, they were the wrong men for the job. Their failures are Joe Torre's failure.
Sad but true.
I'll have more postmortem stuff about the Dodgers in tomorrow's edition of "Kiss 'Em Goodbye" at BP and ESPN Insider. In the meantime, I'll be rooting for the other half of my portfolio as the Yankees try to wrap up their first pennant in six years.
The late Bart Giamatti famously observed that baseball is designed to break your heart, but the former commissioner was notably silent about its ability to strangle you with your own entrails. That's how I felt on Monday, watching two teams near and dear fritter away late-inning leads and ultimately suffer walk-off losses.
Last Friday had me aglow. For the first time since October 9, 2004 and just the second time in my entire adult life, the Dodgers and Yankees—the two teams at the heart of what I've long referred to as my Bicoastal Disorder, a complicated set of rooting interests borne of blood and geography—both won playoff games. My dream of a World Series which would replicate the formative matchups of my youth was intact. The drop from that high point to Monday's action was dizzying, to say the least.
I offer that introduction not as a plea for sympathy. Indeed, the inherent contradictions of this life I've chosen have been the fuel for nearly a decade of writing beyond the decimals and differentials that make up so much of my work here, and I'm hardly ungrateful for this playoff bounty, particularly in the face of an angry mob of Tigers/Cardinals/Twins/Your-Team-Here fans. Nonetheless, Monday's twin killing will have to suffice as an excuse for the rather disjointed account that follows. As a fan, I feel as though I've been run over by a Mack truck. As an analyst... yep, Mack Truck again.
By far the more glancing of the two blows from Monday's action came in the ALCS, where the Yankees squandered a 3-0 lead thanks to a curious set of decisions by Yankees (over)manager Joe Girardi, all of which blew up in his face in spectacular fashion à la Wile E. Coyote. I'll leave that postmortem to others except to note that the Yankees still hold a two games to one lead in the series. Suffice it to say that my forehead was sufficiently tenderized for the nightcap.
As with the rest of the NLCS, Game Four continued to defy the percentages... [Dodger starter Randy] Wolf came into his start having allowed just one home run against lefty hitters all season long, and having held them to to a feeble .159/.217/.200 line in 185 plate appearances. [Ryan] Howard hit just six of his 45 homers against southpaws, managing just a .207/.298/.356 line. Yet when Wolf left a fastball up in the strike zone during last night's first-inning confrontation, Howard demolished it for a two-run homer.
We can scratch our heads and curse or cheer at the defiance of those percentages, but we'd do just as well to remember that Wolf's fateful pitch was set up by very human reactions. Home-plate umpire Ted Barrett, whose strike zone was small enough to fit into a pocket protector, made a lousy call on the preceding 2-1 fastball, which caught plenty of the plate according to both TBS's pitch tracking device and MLB Advanced Media's Gameday. Catcher Russell Martin had set up on the outside half of the plate, however, and in reaching back across his body to receive the pitch, swayed the umpire's judgment. Backed into a corner against the slugger, the flustered Wolf clearly still had that call on his mind when he served up Howard's homer, given the camera shot of him jawing with Barrett as he received a new baseball.
... At the outset of this series, my prediction hinged on the way the Dodgers' lefty pitching matched up with the Phillies' lefty hitting and vice versa, but thus far the Phillies have gotten the advantage. By my quick tally, Utley, Howard, Ibañez, and Cole Hamels are a combined 5-for-18 with two homers, nine RBI, seven walks, and four strikeouts against the Dodgers' southpaws, good for a .440 on-base percentage and a .611 slugging percentage. In the first two games, Dodger lefties Andre Ethier, James Loney, and Jim Thome started off 5-for-8 with a double, a homer, three RBI, and three walks against Philly southpaws, but they went 0-for-6 with a pair of K's against Cliff Lee on Sunday night.
So it goes. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, "Tell your statistics to shut up."
Meanwhile, Dodger general manager Ned Colletti, better known as Stupid Flanders around these parts, has been granted a three-year contract extension. I have very mixed feelings about this; on the one hand, the Dodgers appear to have a pair of talented GM prospects in Kim Ng and Logan White, and among Colletti's moves are some real clinkers, such as the Juan Pierre, Jason Schmidt and Andruw Jones contracts, the trades of Edwin Jackson and Carlos Santana. On the other hand, the Dodgers have made the playoffs in three of the four years on Colletti's watch. They did so this year having trimmed $18 million from the Opening Day payroll relative to last year, and late-season pickups such as Vicente Padilla, Ronnie Belliard, Jon Garland and George Sherrill — all of them low cost except for the latter, who required the surrender of third base prospect Josh Bell — were instrumental in the team finishing with the league's best record.
In the context of an extended rumination about the winter's potential front office turmoil, Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman nails it:
Honestly, there's another chapter to be written before we come to a firm conclusion about Colletti's value as a GM, and that's when the young Dodgers stars who have been earning from $400,000 to $4 million earn the service time that multiplies their salaries tenfold. That's when Colletti won't be able to pencil in low-paying stars in half his starting lineup anymore. There will be a host of difficult decisions to be made – the more of these guys Colletti wants to keep, the more difficulty he'll have overpaying to fill the gaps elsewhere, especially if the McCourts' travails lead to the team being put up for sale, with the budget for salaries locked down.
Grappling with the Colletti question is something I'll be doing later this winter in the forthcoming Baseball Prospectus annual.
Speaking of Dodger critiques and moving along the spectrum from astute commentary to blithering idiocy is this takedown of Joe Torre. There's a lot to take issue with regarding the way Torre has run the Dodgers during the NLCS — starting with the counterintuitive rotation plan and some Game One pitching changes — but Yahoo Jeff Passan, who's certainly capable of better, manages to catch absolutely none of it. He's so busy building a gallows for Torre to re-hang him for his crimes in the Bronx that he can't point to a single bad decision that's disadvantaged the Dodgers in this series. The takehome seems to be that Dodgers are losing — and thus about to end the season in total failure — because Torre's years with the Yankees were part of some big fraud, and he now gets paid more than he's worth. Wait, what?
Seriously, robot monkeys could churn out such execrable hackwork, which makes this revelation that an automated product called Stats Monkey can now write semi-competent game stories all the less surprising. No word on whether Passan was running Stats Monkey's sibling program, Outrage Monkey, but would it surprise anyone?
Back up a bit. On Thursday night, the Dodgers lost the opener of their National League Championship Series to the Phillies in exasperating fashion. After four mostly dazzling innings, Clayton Kershaw suffered a fifth-inning meltdown and Joe Torre, who navigated the Dodgers past the Cardinals thanks to a quick hook and aggressive bullpen management, fiddled while Chavez Ravine burned. Here's an excerpt from my writeup at Baseball Prospectus.
Clayton Kershaw wasn't ready for his close-up. Tabbed to start the opening game of the National League Championship Series, the 21-year-old Dodger lefty dazzled for the first four innings, holding the Phillies to a single and a pair of walks while striking out two, at times flashing the big-bending curve that Vin Scully termed "Public Enemy Number One" before the kid even had a day of major league service. Alas, he came unraveled in the fifth inning, and it was excruciating to watch.
Joe Torre wasn't ready for his close-up either. Lauded in this space and elsewhere for his deft handling of his pitching staff during the Division Series — handling that included boldly giving struggling Game One starter Randy Wolf the hook despite a 3-2 lead with two outs in the fourth inning — the Dodger manager spit the bit on Thursday night. He fiddled while Kershaw became a deer in the headlights of the Phillies' Mack truck offense, all in an effort to prevent himself from having to use one of his three lefty relievers, and one of his six pinch-hitters. By the time he finally emerged from the dugout to pull Kershaw, five runs had scored.
It could have been prevented. By the time Kershaw surrendered the coup de grâce, a two-run double to Ryan Howard (yes, off of a lefty), he had already walked three hitters in the fifth, including the hacktastic Pedro Feliz and pitcher Cole Hamels. He had also surrendered two hits, a leadoff single to Raul Ibañez and a three-run homer to Carlos Ruiz. He had additionally set an LCS record by throwing three wild pitches in the inning. As Chase Utley flung his bat away to take his base, he had thrown 31 pitches amid this meltdown, and Torre had both lefty Scott Elbert and righty Ramon Troncoso warming up in the bullpen. Beyond the numbers, the kid appeared to be rushing his tempo and hemorrhaging self-confidence, but pitching coach Rick Honeycutt had already visited to the mound prior to Ruiz's at-bat — which worked like a charm, obviously — and catcher Russell Martin was putting on a performance behind the plate that was only slightly better than this guy, so he wasn't exactly in a position to be calming his rattled batterymate's nerves...
Torre stuck to the percentages, keeping his wild, flagging not-yet-ace southpaw matched up with a slugger who hit just .207/.298/.356 against lefties this year and owns just a .226/.310/.444 line against them in over 1,000 career plate appearances — the latter more than 300 points of OPS below his showing against righties. He left a 94 mph fastball over the plate, and Howard smoked it to right field, expanding a 3-1 lead to 5-1 and finally spelling the end of the night for Kershaw. The Dodgers would keep the game tight thanks to an off night by Hamels and some shakiness in the grand tradition of the Phillies bullpen, but they ultimately fell, 8-6.
All night long, on both sides, it was lefty-on-lefty violence, the kind of thing that could drive an analyst whose central thesis in previewing the series was that the Dodgers were better suited to attack the Phillies' weaknesses and counteract their strengths based upon the balance of lefties in the lineup and bullpen. Instead, batter after batter seemed to defy my analysis and the percentage, with Howard and Raul Ibañez collecting the big blows off the lefties Kershaw and George Sherrill.
In any event, the Dodgers pinned their hopes for Game Two on Vicente Padilla, a late-season pickup who was released by the Rangers in part because he had become a clubhouse distraction. The Phillies countered with their own late-season pickup, a guy you may have heard of, Pedro Martinez. The odd symmetry of this matchup was that Padilla started his career with the Phillies and Pedro, more famously, with the Dodgers. Tommy Lasorda infamously proclaimed that the young righty — whose older brother, Ramon, was on his way to becoming the staff ace — was too slight to survive the rigors of starting pitching. Given that Lasorda shredded Ramon's arm in the grand tradition of Rick Rhoden, Doug Rau, Fernando Valenzuela and Orel Hershiser, it was probably for the best in the grand scheme that Pedro was traded away.
On a sunny 93 degree (!) day at Chavez Ravine, the two pitchers matched zeroes for three innings before Howard smashed a solo homer to left field. Pedro no longer has the stuff to miss many bats; he generated just four Dodgers swings and misses all day, but he prevented them from making solid contact. Hitter after hitter could only pop the ball up harmlessly. Padilla was nearly as good, throwing mid-90s fastballs to both sides of the plate.
The lone run stood up as the sole blemish on the scoreboard for nearly an entire afternoon as a rich tableau unfolded, with Martinez, the future Hall of Famer, thrilling us perhaps one final time on the big stage through little but guile and deception, and Padilla, the black-hatted villain to Martinez's aging sheriff, standing his own ground by summoning a power he had only intermittently tapped throughout his own career. It was the kind of pitcher's duel that made your hair stand on end, regardless of your rooting interests, filled with a mixture of joy at the opportunity to catch such a great ballgame, and melancholy at the prospect that it would somehow end, and that one of the two valiant, grizzled hurler's efforts would go for naught.
At the start of our BP Roundtable, colleague Kevin Goldstein took the following question from a reader:
Wheels (Virginia): Anyone care to lay odds on a 1 to 0 game with both starters around in the 8th inning?
[KG]: If Pedro pitches into the eighth, I will, in honor of the great Werner Herzog, eat my shoe.
He very nearly had to eat his words and said shoe, just as the German New Wave film director (no relation to Whitey) famously did to pay off a bet with fellow director Errol Morris. Luckily for him, Martinez was pulled after seven shutout innings, still leading 1-0. Padilla got one out in the eighth before he departed to a thunderous ovation.
Freed of those two gunslingers, the game broke open in the bottom of the eighth, as the Dodgers strung together a rally against no less than five Philly relievers, with the tying run scoring as Chase Utley airmailed — Knoblauched, really — a potential double play ball into foul territory for the second time in as many games. The Dodgers pulled ahead when Phils lefty J.A. Happ issued a bases-loaded walk to Andre Ethier, the lefty whom he'd been summoned to face. They might have gotten more had Manny Ramirez not popped up Chad Durbin's first pitch with the bases loaded to end the frame, but Jonathan Broxton bolted the door shut in the ninth to even the series. What a game.
As for the Yankees and Angels, their game, played under wet and frigid conditions in the Bronx, couldn't help but pale by comparison. Both teams featured the odd sight of players wearing ear flaps or body socks, none more conspicuous than Angels shortstop Erick Aybar, who dazedly let Hideki Matsui's potential inning-ending popup drop in front of him as third baseman Chone Figgins looked on with near-equal cluelessness. Johnny Damon, running from second with the pitch, crossed the plate with the Yankees' second run of the inning. Seemingly psyched out because of the cold, the Angels made three errors in the field, and they could do little at the plate against CC Sabathia, who pitched eight strong innings before Mariano Rivera finished things off.
I watched the entirety of both games, chatting with BP colleagues Goldstein and Steven Goldman throughout, with Joe Sheehan joining us for the first game and Will Carroll for the nightcap. It was an epic day in front of the laptop and the TV, but it was a whole lot of fun.
As for the only other day in my adult life that the Dodgers and Yankees both won playoff games, I remember it well. Alex Belth invited my wife and I to trek up to Riverdale to watch the Yankees eliminate the Twins on the strength of a four-run eighth-inning rally to tie the game via a big homer by Ruben Sierra, and then some 11th-inning heroics by Alex Rodriguez, who doubled, stole third, and scored on a wild pitch. I wrote about that game here.
But not before writing about the nightcap. My wife and I had plans to attend a friend's birthday party afterward, so I missed the bulk of what became the Dodgers' first postseason victory in 16 years thanks to Jose Lima's bravura performance against the Cardinals. Knowing the result, I still watched the final three innings when I got home, just to see the frenzied jubilation of Dodger Stadium's denizens. You'd think they had won the World Series given the joy. Instead they'd watched the Dodgers shed a monkey off their backs. They didn't win another game that October, but they set the stage for much better days. Better days like October 16, 2009, a day of baseball I'll not soon forget.
My epic-length preview of the Dodgers-Phillies National League Championship Series matchup is up at Baseball Prospectus. Whatever its merits or flaws, I'm reasonably certain it's the LONGEST preview of its kind. Getting the chance to do a Playoff Prospectus is an honor, and I always try to pour myself into the project, word count be damned. To me, arriving at a prediction — Dodgers in six, in this case — isn't as important as the analysis behind it, because I don't go into the process with my mind made up. Admittedly, my knowledge of the Dodgers is deeper than that of the Phils, particularly because I already previewed their first-round series. I did the Philliestwice last year, which helped make up for seeing less of their first-round series than any of the others.
The key in this series is the bullpens:
Dodgers IP ERA WXRL rFRA
RHP Jonathan Broxton 76.0 2.61 4.89 2.63
LHP George Sherrill* 69.0 1.70 4.30 1.83
RHP Ramon Troncoso 82.2 2.72 3.50 2.79
RHP Ronald Belisario 70.2 2.04 0.19 2.99
LHP Hong-Chih Kuo 30.0 3.00 1.10 2.32
RHP Jeff Weaver 79.0 3.65 1.75** 4.02
RHP Chad Billingsley 196.1 4.03 3.72** 4.38
Phillies IP ERA WXRL rFRA
RHP Brad Lidge 58.2 7.21 -3.26 8.44
RHP Ryan Madson 77.1 3.26 2.32 3.08
LHP Scott Eyre 30.0 1.50 1.55 2.17
RHP Chan Ho Park 83.1 4.43 1.93** 3.00
RHP Chad Durbin 69.2 4.39 0.95 4.96
LHP Antonio Bastardo 23.2 6.46 -0.10# 7.06
rFRA: Relief-only FRA
*: Full-season combined statistics
**: SNLVAR + WXRL
#: SNLVAR
Let us not mince words: given the Dodger rotation's limited stamina, this team's post-season fate falls squarely on the shoulders of their bullpen. Fortunately, those are big shoulders, and [Joe] Torre demonstrated his knack for using his relief corps to shorten games in the Division Series. Their bullpen has such depth that they were able to withstand the early hook of Wolf, and to match up Broxton with Albert Pujols in the late innings of all three games, regardless of whether it was the eighth or ninth. Dodger relievers tossed 9 2/3 innings in the series, allowing eight hits and one walk while striking out seven, stranding four baserunners inherited from starters and yielding two runs, both in garbage time. Work like that wins championships.
Not that it should be a great surprise, given that the team led the league with 13.2 WXRL, and that Broxton not only led the league in that category, but led all relievers in strikeouts (114) and strikeout rate (13.5 per nine). The deadline addition of Sherrill was key, as it prevented Torre from burning out the likes of Belisario and Troncoso while offering him a hurler who smothers lefties (.163/.226/.261 career) and has experience closing; Sherrill put up a 0.70 FRA [Fair Run Average] in high-leverage duty after coming over. Fellow southpaw Kuo's second-half return to form (2.19 ERA, 28/9 K/BB ratio in 24 2/3 innings) following elbow troubles provides the Dodgers with two chances to stifle Howard in the late innings. Elsewhere, Belisario and Troncoso generate ground balls by the bushel while steering clear of the long ball. The former was hell on righties (.157/.234/.252). The latter, who didn't pitch in the Division Series after losing a bit of Torre's confidence over the season's final two months (a 4.87 ERA and 5.3 BB/9 will do that) nonetheless finished eighth in the league in WXRL. Weaver was a late addition to the playoff roster, and came up huge in relief of [Randy] Wolf, wriggling out of a bases-loaded jam and getting the win; he provides Torre with another situational righty, not to mention an unhappy reminder that the manager's post-season record in handling bullpens is hardly spotless. Left out of the rotation, Billingsley's ability to miss bats is yet another weapon.
By contrast the Phillies' bullpen rates as a serious concern, even after [Charlie] Manuel successfully navigated it through the Colorado series. One year after converting every save opportunity en route to a World Championship, Lidge blew 11 saves and set a record for the lowest single-season WXRL. The Phils mulled various options during the season's final weeks, but ultimately Manuel gave him the ball to close out the final two games, albeit with a caveat. Reintroducing a cut fastball into his repertoire against lefties, Lidge worked around a pair of walks while pitching the entire ninth inning in Game Three, and came on with two outs and two on in Game Four—following Manuel's situationally-based choice to start the inning with the lefty Eyre—to strike out Troy Tulowiztki, closing out the series.
Part of the reason Manuel wound up returning to Lidge is because of the rest of the bullpen's limitations, primarily due to injuries. Madson remains his top set-up man, capable of missing bats and getting more than three outs when the need dictates. The most obvious choice to supplant Lidge — he saved 10 games this year — Madson's move to the ninth leaves a vacuum that the Phils couldn't fill. The Phils had hoped Brett Myers could assume a high-leverage role, but he remains less than 100 percent following hip surgery. Trouble finding the strike zone in his sole Division Series appearance, as well as doubts about his ability to pitch consecutive days, have cost him a roster spot in favor of Park. The team's second most effective reliever (2.1 WXRL, 3.00 FRA, 9.4 K/9 after moving from the rotation), Park hasn't pitched in a game since September 16 due to a hamstring strain. Durbin's a lower-leverage righty who walks far too many hitters for his own good (5.8 UIBB/9); he nonetheless saw eighth-inning duty in Game Three, after Manuel used Madson to put out a fire lit by Eyre in the seventh. Eyre, of course, is now the top lefty due to J.C. Romero's torn flexor tendon; he doesn't stifle lefties to quite the extent of most specialists (.240/.321/.396 career), nor does he miss many bats. Bastardo is a rookie who showed little platoon difference during his June in the rotation, but he did whiff 7.2 per nine.
How Manuel will use Blanton and Happ, his two options to start Game Four, remains to be seen. Blanton served in middle relief in Game Two and as the long man in Game Three, surrendering a run each time. Happ faced one batter in Game Two, gave up a hit, and served up a dud of a start (three innings, seven baserunners, three runs) under frigid conditions before departing due to a comebacker off of his shin. The summer's rotation savior scuffled down the stretch, with a 4.83 ERA and zero quality starts after August 27.
Admittedly, I've got plenty of emotion wrapped up in this series, but that's one of the reasons I'm so thorough with my analysis. And in the end, I can't help but conclude that the Dodgers' righty-heavy lineup and deep bullpen sets them up to attack the Phillies' weaknesses — and counteract their strengths — better than the Phillies can do same, plus they have the benefit of home-field advantage. Here's hoping they can seize the opportunity and avenge last year's loss.
